Relatedly I’ve heard it said the purpose of propaganda is not to serve the masses false information but to sew so much doubt and confusion that no one knows what to believe. And that such a population, lacking all conviction in anything, is easier to control. It’s a similar point to the one below — that even if many of the conspiracy theories are actually true, the bigger purpose is served that nothing can be trusted, everything is up for grabs. That way, you can have good evidence of sex trafficking, election rigging, influence peddling, virus creation, mandating poisonous injections, even Clinton-esque serial “coincidental deaths” and it all just goes into the “conspiracy theory” bucket of “who knows?” View quoted note →

Last night I found a giant cockroach in my office. Heard a rustling in the plant next to my desk, thought it as just a harmless moth, ignored it. Then I heard it again skittering along the floor, looked down, almost lost my shit. Was disgusting. I have no fear of most insects, even help ease spiders out the door gently without killing them, but roaches are truly horrifying to me, especially giant ones. You can’t even kill them because of how sickening it is to hear the crunch and see their filthy guts spill out. So I naturally got my 13 YO and her friend who was sleeping over to check it out, and they screamed their lungs out which gave me a good laugh. Then the three of us strategized on what kind of bowl to get and how to slide a piece of cardboard under it to throw it out onto the balcony. I was able to get the bowl over it, but my daughter insisted *she* hold the bowl onto the cardboard as we shuffled it along the wood floor and lifted it over the ledge to the balcony, wherein it escaped, but luckily it went out instead of in, and I slammed the door shut. Good times!

Guess the “Trump’s a warmonger, it’s WWIII” mania died down? Netanyahu owns him and will force him to send troops into Iran? Ring a bell, or already memory-holed? Fuckin’ crickets in my feed. The counter narrative is the new narrative. Stay frosty af.

Groupthink is near-term adaptive, medium-tem adaptive, long-term highly maladaptive.

Many swap peer consensus for truth and of course don't realize they have done so -- after all they tell themselves it's the truth! This is socially adaptive behavior -- go along to get along -- but in the long run you get rekt, e.g., fiat over BTC or taking Pfizer's latest.

When narrative and reality diverge, most will stick with narrative until they have no choice.